So I drove it out with hard physical exercise, with time and distance, hoping I could blunt the sharp edge of my resistance to committing myself fully to Stoker. My demeanour, ordinarily so tranquil as to be remarkable, was frequently waspish as I came back, always, to the fact that even if I wanted to go to him, he had insisted upon the gift of time. If time was what he wanted, he should have all the time in the world, I decided. In fact, I would grow weary and withered and ancient before I would stir a singlesteptowards him. If I suffered from the loss of his company, then he should suffer as well, I decided. I had my dignity, after all.
I do not know how long I might have maintained my lofty determination to wait for him to make the first move. I might still be wandering the Lombard hills, butterfly net in hand, had Tiberius not appeared one morning at breakfast, bags packed and travel arranged. Our hotel, a converted castello, was very fine and comfortable but with few of the comforts so beloved of the English traveller. The beds were hard, the pillows nonexistent, and the mosquitoes particularly aggressive. Worst of all possible woes, the tea was unspeakable and I had almost resigned myself to drinking coffee. I was peering into the murky depths of the teapot when Tiberius took the chair across from me.
“I wish to find Stoker,” he said flatly. “Do you know where one might run him to ground?”
I put aside the crime that passed for tea in those parts and gave him a level look. “Somewhere in Bavaria, if Lord Rosemorran’s lettersare accurate. But his lordship can be vague about such things, and this is, after all, Stoker of whom we are speaking, a man inclined to follow his most wayward impulses. He might be in Batavia. Or Bolivia. Or Bechuana.” He did not respond to my little witticism and I gave him a close look. Tiberius was, like all the Templeton-Vane men, a singularly handsome fellow. But there were plummy shadows under his eyes, and a line, slim but severe, etched its way across his brow. “Tiberius, why do you want to find Stoker?”
He hesitated, itself cause for alarm, and then said three words which chilled me to my marrow.
“I need him.”
•••
The fact that Tiberius Templeton-Vane, ninth viscount of the same, expressed any emotion as lowering asneedof another person was mildly terrifying. He was the most self-possessed man I had ever met, his character having long since been shaped by the ineffable knowledge that he was the firstborn son of an aristocrat, heir to a fortune, a title, and an estate. His privilege was as much a part of him as his elegant hands or his superb sense of dress. Tiberius, so long as I had known him, needed no one and nothing—least of all his scapegrace brother. Stoker had, almost since the cradle, been considered the cuckoo in the nest. (The fact that their mother’s dalliance with an Irish painter was actually responsible for Stoker’s paternity only augmented this division.) Stoker had rebelled against the family’s strictures, taking himself off for the first time when he was twelve years of age. His putative father, the eighth viscount, had him apprehended and returned to Cherboys, the family estate in Devon, but Stoker simply ran away again. And again. Every time he was hauled back to Cherboys, he bided his time and then left. In due course, the viscount stopped retrieving him and Stoker fell in with a travelling circus beforestudying medicine in Edinburgh and later becoming a surgeon’s mate in Her Majesty’s Navy.
Through his perambulations, he had lost the thread of connection with his family, and by the time I had met him, some three years previous to these events, there was almost no communication between Stoker and his three brothers, their father having died the year before I came into his life. He had been independent for so long that it had almost become a matter of pride for him that he did not rely upon the Templeton-Vane name or its influence to open doors for him. He lived by his own talents, and this was met by his brothers sometimes with good-natured bafflement and sometimes with resentful envy. Their own lives had been laid out for them by the late Lord Templeton-Vane, and none of the three had the courage or will to deviate from the appointed path. Tiberius, as the eldest, had succeeded to the title. The second, Sir Rupert, had been granted a baronetcy for his services to the Crown as a barrister who dabbled in secret diplomacy. The youngest, Merryweather—shoved into the Church, possibly against his will—had been granted the living of the parish of Dearsley, the village nearest to Cherboys. The brothers were settled, with varying degrees of satisfaction, in their roles.
And yet. Now and then, so fleeting I could almost believe it my own fancy, each of them had looked at Stoker with something akin to jealousy. I was not surprised. It was the same expression frequently aimed in my direction, usually by women with too many children and too much time spent embroidering tea cloths. To make one’s own money, to direct one’s own destiny, these were heady gifts indeed.
Such was the nature of my thoughts as Tiberius and I steamed our way north. Summer had lingered in Italy, but as we climbed into the forested mountains of southern Germany, the leaves shifted from glimmering green to the russet-edged hint of the coming autumn. Spirals of woodsmoke curled from cottages tucked in the woods, and lazy fogsdrifted across the valleys. It was a fairy-tale landscape, a place to believe in witches and wolves, and the feeling of unreality grew the further into Bavaria we travelled. Lord Rosemorran’s letters had not been explicit on the subject of Stoker’s whereabouts, but I had a fair idea of where to begin our search, and it was in the third village we made enquiries where the innkeeper regaled us with the story of the beast that stalked the forest by night.
“You really believe it is Stoker?” Tiberius asked as I wiped the delicate foam of the Weissbier from my lips.
“Certainly,” I said. “And tonight, I have no doubt, this particularly elusive game will be afoot.”
•••
The details of our search for Stoker do not bear relating. Suffice it to say the first few hours of our endeavour were spent scrambling over rocky precipices guided only by lantern light and my unerring instinct for Stoker’s presence. We traversed hillsides, climbing over boulders and through the fir-forested thickets, an exhilarating adventure under certain circumstances. These were not those circumstances. Tiberius, to whom any form of physical exercise is anathema, kept up a steady stream of complaints, first loudly and then—as his breathing became laboured and his stamina began to flag—whispered in a sinking voice one associates with genteel invalids with wasting diseases.
“Really, Tiberius,” I chided. “This is hardly more than aramble.”
“Ram-ramble?” he panted. “I am dying. My life has passed before my eyes,” he added as he stumbled to a halt, grasping a low-hanging branch for support. “And if there were a clergyman to hand, I would confess my sins and lay myself down to my eternal rest.”
I rolled my eyes. “You have all the subtlety of a melodrama heroine,” I informed him. “And the endurance of a particularly tiny sea slug. Where is your spirit, sir? Where is yourgrit?”
“In my other trousers,” he said, his jaws clenched.
I opened my mouth to remonstrate further when I heard it, the soft rustle of branches, disturbed not by the wind but by the movement of some stealthy creature.
“What,” Tiberius demanded, “in the name of god’s teeth is that?”
“A large deer, perhaps,” I suggested. “Or possibly a bear? Maybe a wolf. Do they still have wolves in the Bavarian Alps?”
We turned as one as the sound grew louder, the gentle susurration of the tree limbs giving way to thunderous crashes and the sound of some mammoth beast moving through the darkness to where we stood in the deceptive security of our little pool of warm light.
I had been teasing Tiberius, but the fact of the matter was that bears did still inhabit those mountains, and even if the wolves had long since vanished, there might still be large, predatory cats with a taste for aristocratic, city-softened flesh.
I stepped in front of Tiberius to shield him from certain death as the branches parted to reveal an enormous furry form, its shaggy coat thick with brambles. It emerged on all fours, low to the ground and lumbering forwards, a great heaving growl issuing forth in a sort of mournful ululation.
I held my lantern high and stood my ground as the creature lifted its head—no doubt to bay at the rising moon, I decided.
But as the lantern light fell upon its hairy face, I smiled.
“Hello, Stoker.”
CHAPTER
2
